There were too many cars on his street so Francis parked his ute two blocks from home and walked back. The words in the concrete underneath his feet said the same thing every few metres, Jesus Saves. He practised not stepping on cracks like he did when he was a child (step on a crack, break your father’s back!).
Now he was turning the corner. Now he was looking towards his home from across the street. Now he was noticing that a large piece of the white picket fence had fallen down and was lying on the pavement. Now he was slapped in the face by that giant image in blue paint that took up every inch of the concrete lawn in front of his house. No More Boats. It was written in shaky letters in the middle of a circle with a slash through it. On further inspection Francis saw that a little sail boat was drawn in there too underneath the lettering, in case someone didn’t get the message.
Sometimes he felt like shit only happened at his place, and as he stood there on the other side of the road where all the houses were quiet and still, he knew it had to be true. Some other things that were beginning to grab his attention: two kids, fifteenish, standing on their skateboards in the gutter throwing pebbles at the windows of his home; an older man in khakis taking photographs of the house with a giant black camera; the builders from the site next door hanging over the fence, pointing and arguing, flicking their cigarette butts over onto the driveway. Also, the noise, nothing distinguishable, just a kind of low buzz around the place like things were about to start happening. SUVs and bashed-up Hondas drove by, slowed down, people stuck their heads out car windows and pointed. An old man from the retirement home down the road was sitting on his white plastic chair at the very corner of its lawn so that he could watch all the action with his arms folded across his lap.
And so, because he couldn’t think of a better plan, Francis crossed the road, looking straight at the side of the house like something important was waiting for him there, and just kept going, even when he felt the hard flick of pebbles hitting the back of his head.
Around the side of the house there was a tin of paint knocked over. Its blue insides crept into the bushes next to where a paint brush had been left to dry. He made his way to the back and through the sliding glass doors on the porch. Inside, after all the business of the outside, there was only silence.
In the kitchen: no one; in the living room: no one. In the bedroom his father was lying underneath a sheet, snoring, his bare shoulders poking up over the top. Francis realised he had not been inside his parents’ room in years. It was something of a shock to see it now, to realise it looked the same, to be so close to his father lying barely clothed underneath a sheet. There were the pictures of him and Clare as children sitting on the bedside table. There’s Clare – always with that look on her face as if she knows everything that’s coming – her hair in tight braids on each side of her head, standing at attention, waiting to be praised. Francis stood right next to her, his face knitted together with frustration, maybe because his sister was leaning her hand on his head or maybe because the world had already become so hard to understand and he hadn’t yet discovered all the mind-altering substances that would make him think he did get it, even if only for a short moment. Those ugly paintings of flowers his mother bought at a garage sale years ago were still on the wall, the bright yellow of sunflowers, faded now to the colour of mustard vomit.
He went to the window and peered through the venetians. Outside, the kids on skateboards had gone but the cars were now slowing down to a stop. Two Islander-looking women got out of a purple ute and took photographs of each other in front of the house. He looked back at his dad – still sleeping. The man before him was old now, he could see, older than the image he had of him in his head. His father’s hair had turned completely white and sat in sparse clumps. He’d gotten old and mad, or maybe he’d always been mad and had just started getting old. That rotted statue of St Francis had made its way from where it had shown up in the living room and was now sitting on the table beside his bed.
And now? What do I do now? He turned around and walked back into the kitchen where he knew his mother kept her little address book in the drawer. He found the number for the mobile phone his dad gave his sister and did something he never did, he called her up. It was Clare who asked the first question straight after he’d said ‘hi’.
‘Do you know what your father did?’ she asked as if she had no part in the family. That question. It was always coming back at him like someone throwing a rock at his head from behind. Before he could find anything to say he looked up to catch the back of his father as he walked towards the front door, his silent movements aided by the fact that he was wearing no shoes, no clothes, nothing but his underwear. The silence only made the opening of the front door even louder. Francis dropped the phone. He caught up to his father just as half a dozen eggs came flying into the house. When Francis slammed the door shut, it sounded as though another dozen hit the door with a wet thud. His father didn’t move. He just stood there with arms folded, staring at the door like he was ready for a fight but didn’t know where to find one.
Francis held his father’s elbow gently and guided him towards the couch. He didn’t resist, he just sat down in that same space where the indent in the cushion said he’d been many times before.
Francis swallowed hard and spoke softly. ‘What are you doing, Dad?’
‘Me? What are they doing out there? Too many people. So much fuss. All those boats. Too many boats.’
His father looked confused and tired. The white cotton of his underwear was stained with egg yolk and it was threadbare, so that it had become almost see-through, exposing the outline of his flaccid penis beneath. Francis couldn’t bear to look at him. From the kitchen he heard his sister shouting through the phone he hadn’t put back on the receiver.